Claudine Gay’s Most Grievous Sin

January 10, 2024

Claudine Gay’s sudden resignation from Harvard has been an eye-opener. Why would Harvard appoint a serial plagiarizer with an undistinguished scholarly record as its President?  Or a person with such limited administrative experience?    

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Nevertheless, this disaster is even worse. Claudine Gay is intent on promoting the Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity (DIE) agenda whose aim is to radically transform the United States, including universities such as Harvard. Nor is she alone in her radical quest.  According to one sampling of universities, the average university employes some 45 functionaries responsible for promoting the DIE program to recruit additional Black faculty across all departments. Make no mistake, the DIE agenda is all about making racial identity, not merit, central to everything. Hard to imagine an agenda more antithetical to American higher education than DIE.

This is not just an abstract philosophical dispute. The DIE commissars exercise power over faculty appointments, promotions, and departmental budgets while mobilizing students to cancel conservative speakers.  Now for the truly bad news. This power facilitates a sin far worse than plagiarizing: DIE subordinates knowledge to the toxic dogmas of racial identity. After all, Gay’s plagiarism merely takes credit for a truth discovered elsewhere; promoting DIE denies the very existence of objective knowledge in favor of race-based “knowledge.”  

A recent Wall Street Journal article depicted Gay’s almost fanatical promotion of the DIE agenda. Diversity, not merit, was her highest priority and woes to those who resisted her mission to end Harvard’s “enduring legacies of anti-Black racism.” Academic excellence was never her priority.

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Professors are the gatekeepers who decide what research gets published. They evaluate papers submitted to professional journals, review book proposals and funding requests and, critically, decide hiring and firing. This labor is largely invisible to the public, but these activities ultimately define “knowledge.” The importance of the gatekeeper role cannot be overstated. A professor who consciously certifies factually incorrect journal submissions as worthy of publication is anti-truth in an institution committed to truth.  

Honest errors can occur, but it is impermissible to evaluate scholarship based on its conformity to an ideological agenda and the author’s skin color. This bias defines political correctness — certifying truth in accordance with political orthodoxy and race. Imposing an ideological standard can also be deadly.

When the Soviet Union, for purely political  reasons, imposed the crackpot genetic theories of Trofim Lysenko (1898-1976), who insisted that the gene was a “bourgeois invention” and that plants could absorb the traits of their environment, millions in the Soviet Union and its satellites died of starvation. Some 3000 dissenting geneticists and other scientists were imprisoned. In today’s America, political correctness may be doing its harm in medicine.

DIE is about proselytizing the faith, and Claudine Gay and her co-believers have been forcefully populating the academy with fellow ideologues committed to making everything, from the humanities to the hard sciences about race, Students at the elite Rice University can enroll in “Afrochemistry: The Study of Black Lives Matter” to learn how to apply chemistry to the American Black experience. According to the Rice catalogue, in this course, “chemical discoveries will inform personal reflections and proposals for addressing inequities in chemistry and chemical education.” A physics journal recently published “Observing whiteness in introductory physics: A Case Study..” This is what the “long march through the institutions” is about: something is true or false depending on how it conforms with racial dogma.  

It is this racialization of truth that allows an academic paper to be published regardless of evidence. Submissions reaffirming the orthodoxy get published; but if the orthodoxy is disputed, the paper gets rejected. Yet, honoring the orthodoxy may violate the most basic requirements of science, for example, assertions that cannot be falsified, but such criticism merely reflects “White” but not Black science. The upshot is that even the most bizarre claims are deemed true if they reaffirm the Black racial agenda.

Thanks to the growing number of those embracing the DIE agenda, research conducted by nonbelievers writing on a race-related topic will most likely have to satisfy faculty reviewers embracing the DIE orthodoxy and regardless of research quality, heresies will be excluded.  

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Moreover, scholarly gatekeeping is unlike a court of law where an ideological bias can be challenged, and since top journals typically reject most submissions, editors are always looking for reasons to say, “no. “A perfectly fine paper might be declined just because the reviewer finds the conclusions “offensive.” This is an abuse of professional standards since ideology is not supposed to guide professional judgment, but when it does, there is no defense. 

Conversely, a terrible paper, provided it hits the right notes ideologically, can be accepted for publication simply by appealing to the reviewers’ prejudices. In short, the entire scholarly review process is vulnerable to ideological capture, and those who resist have little option other than trying elsewhere and hooping that their work eventually will see the light of the day, a time-consuming strategy detrimental to moving up the academic hierarchy.

To illustrate this power, imagine a paper challenging current racial dogma that electoral politics can uplift Blacks. Such a paper would measure changes in the quality of life for Blacks in income, employment, crime, and healthcare in venues where Blacks became dominant politically via elections. This is the classic “before vs. after” experimental design. Sampled towns would include large cities, e.g., Detroit and Baltimore, plus smaller places such as Gary, Ind, East St. Louis, Mo., Jackson, MS, Camden, NJ, and Selma, Al. The question is whether the shift to Black electoral domination delivered the promised rewards.

The paper demonstrated that electoral success did not result in significant improvement for Blacks and, in many instances, conditions worsened post-election. Such a conclusion is, of course, obvious to anyone who follows politics.  

Would the paper be published? Probably not. Reviewers will invariably allege defects, even imaginary ones, and condemn the results as “racist” for ignoring the “real” reasons why elections failed to deliver, for example, statewide White supremacism. Unproven excuses will abound — Whites sabotaged elected Black leaders, funding was withdrawn when Blacks assumed power, or that Black mayors were subconsciously infected with White racism. Dogma trumps reality.   

If it were miraculously published, attacks would explode with few defenders, the journal that published it would be condemned as racist, and the article might eventually be withdrawn. For junior faculty on the “wrong” side, participating in this research might be career ending. 

The power to suppress heretical research, regardless of its quality and veracity, making the very idea of conducting it unthinkable, helps explain today’s failing racial progress. No wonder every contemporary race-related reform fails, and people like Claudine Gay are responsible for this failure by silencing those who violate the orthodoxy. Likewise, ideologically-driven research may also explain the poor outcomes for many Black medical patents.

Claudine Gay and co-believers fanatically believe that every Black tribulation is the fault of Whites, and sustaining this faith far outranks finding the truth. The damage they inflict is immense. Professor Gay and her ilk are guilty of multiple sins, but killing the truth is the most serious.  

Image: Governor’s Press Office

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